


Under No Circumstances

by iamanawesometaco



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: (hopefully), Attempt at Humor, Canon-Typical Character Death, Canon-Typical Violence, Crack Treated Seriously, Gen, HP: EWE, Lily Evans Potter is a being of incandescent rage, Resurrection Stone, Resurrection Stone Gone Wrong(-ish?), Tags May Change, accidental angst, end of Deathly Hallows rewrite, even happier ending, fucking with fate for fun and profit (and a long fulfilling life), no martyr!Harry, possibly, the good die(d) young, what even is Harry Potter
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-21
Updated: 2017-10-21
Packaged: 2019-01-21 00:30:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 868
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12445383
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iamanawesometaco/pseuds/iamanawesometaco
Summary: Harry accidentally brings his parents back from the dead. Accidentally, of course. He didn'tmeanto. No, really. What's going on? And why is there talk of Australia?Based onFalconLux'sPlot Bunnies: Free To A Good Homeprompt #33. Since some prompts listed there contain sensitive topics, here's this one in full: What if Dumbledore miscalculated in giving Harry the resurrection stone?  What if those who loved Harry most decided to advise him against martyrdom in his teens, even if it means Voldemort wins?





	Under No Circumstances

**Author's Note:**

  * For [FalconLux](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FalconLux/gifts).



> i don't know why there's talk of australia either, harry. it hasn't shown up in a chapter yet but i guess there's still time. 
> 
> jily [james/lily] not tagged (yet?) because a, duh, and b, there's no real couple-y stuff planned so far. i guess they're not very romantic people?  
>  maybe they're shy and don't want pda of them floating around (HA). they also were together for 15+ years as ghosts trying to find harry. ...besides, they have more important things to worry about right now. 
> 
> if you couldn't already tell, this was written on a whim. also, the title, chapter titles, summary, and tags are WIPs and thus subject to change.

"No, Harry! Not my son, no no _no_ , not Harry!" is the first thing Harry hears out of his mother's mouth. She's clutching at another phantasmal figure, half-there and half-ether, sobbing into their shoulder.

Harry drinks her in greedily, taking in every detail about her he can find. Her hair is fiery even in death, and the flashes of her eyes that he sees between her sobs are the same emerald green as his own. She's tall too, about the same height as the... as the James Potter coming into focus beside her. And they're both so young, it's like a punch in the gut, they both can't be much older than twenty, they're _so young_.

His throat is dry, head light and emptied. "Mom?"

She whirls around. "Harry!" His mother stops just short of touching him, hands hovering inches from his face. "Harry, Harry, my baby boy..." Lily Potter drags in a deep, shaking breath, and Harry sees her green eyes _burn_. "Mommy loves you so much, Harry, Mommy loves you."

James Potter curls his hands gently around her shoulders and tugs her back half a foot, the look on his face absolutely _heartbreaking_. "There, Lily-flower, he's alright, _he's alright_ , praise be, he's _all right_ , Lily."

"I'll kill them," she whispers, still frozen with her arms outstretched and her hands cupping air. "I'll kill them, he's not all right James, somebody hurt him somebody hurt my baby James _and I'm going to kill them!_ " Her voice rises in volume and pitch until she's shrieking. Lily yanks her hands back to her chest and tucks one hand into a fist, the other held with fingers clawed.

"We're ghosts, Lily!" James yells back, face contorted with grief to match how hers is twisted with fury. "We're still dead! We can't even touch him, dammit! Just because we—just because we finally found him—" The man voice breaks and he covers his eyes with a hand. "Lily, we finally found him but... but we can't even touch him. He can't hear us, he can't see us—for heaven's sake, Lily, he doesn't even know we're here! That we've been searching for him for so long..."

James sobs, and it's heart-wrenchingly sorrowful, and that's when Harry realizes that his mother wasn't _crying_ , she was _stifling pure wrath_ against her husband's shoulder. His _father_ is the one crying, crying his heart out, even.

Lily rubs gentle circles into his back, but her eyes stay fixed on Harry. "James, he's gotten so big. Look at him! He's... he looks like you when you were fifteen, James, but oh, those are my eyes! We made such a handsome lad. He's, he's been hurt, but he looks so strong, doesn't he?"

"If only he didn't have to be," James chokes out. "We couldn't protect him! He grew up without us! Lily, Lily, Lily-flower, we died and we left him alone!"

Harry's mother looks at her husband at last. Harry can't even tear his eyes away from them. Minutes away from Voldemort's camp in the forest and he can't tear his eyes away. They're so young. "I'd rather he grow up alone and actually have the _chance_ to grow up, James."

"Oh of course," he dismisses. "But still. We left him. We'll just... have to never leave him again then. We spent more than a decade looking for him and we only just now find him! We can't let him _go_ , Lily!"

"We're not letting him go!" She is visibly affronted. "He's our _son_ , if you think I'm passing on to the afterlife just because I finally found my son alone and bloodied in the Forbidden Forest at night under the family invisibility cloak, you're madder than you were when I married you!"

A slow moment of mutual disbelief passes.

Lily Potter launches herself at Harry again, hands all a-flutter but never quite touching. "Harry! Oh, who hurt you dear, Mommy'll _take care of it_ for you, you need rest and potions and heavens above you're still just a child! James! Why does he look like he just got out of a fight?!"

James is wringing his hands just behind her, narrowly avoiding being elbowed and smacked. "He's been put through the _wringer_ , hasn't he just, he needs sleep and a good reliable Healer—"

"Ex _cuse_ me?"

"One that he can actually _hear_ , love—"

"That's because I did just get out of a fight," Harry says. "I look like this because I just got out of a fight. There's a bit of a war on, you know." Tentatively, he reaches out and wraps his ashy fingers around a deceptively-delicate, translucent wrist, and his other hand gently stills his father's nervous, see-through hands.

If Lily Potter was still breathing, Harry's pretty sure she would have stopped. As it is, the emphatic heaving of her chest ceases. James Potter looks like he's about to faint or scream or possibly hit something. Their arms are solid to the touch, slightly cool but quickly warming up—first slowly but then much quicker, spreading from his point of contact with them like a dripping watercolor painting in reverse, they're turning peachier and more opaque by the second. More alive-looking.

"Mom? Dad?"

**Author's Note:**

> my problem with posting seems to be threefold: i lose interest in things quickly but don't want to post unfinished works (HAHA), my chapters tend to be short which i hate so i take forever trying to write 3 my-size-chapters of content for 1 posted chapter (HA), and it's a pain to transfer my chapters to ao3 in particular. 
> 
> however! i like writing. i also like feedback and that giddy feeling of knowing someone, _anyone_ is reading my works. i love/hate actually posting things. things were so much easier on wattpad back in 2013. and on FFN in 2014. haha ha hah a


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